maps 
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6/18/2023
Maps are the Record of Humans' Imagination of the World
by Meredith F. Small
World maps have always been made without regard for practicality. Useless for navigation or for demarcating ownership, they are imaginative and expressive of a society's view of the world—which makes them important.
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SOURCE: Bloomberg CityLab
11/29/2021
New Book Revisits the Debate over NYC's Iconic Subway Maps
For fans of transit cartography, the New York Subway Map Debate of April 20, 1978, is remembered as a legendary showdown between two irreconcilable approaches.
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11/21/2021
To Grasp Geopolitical Transformations, Don't Forget to Look at the Map
by Tim Marshall
Historians and thinkers in other fields could benefit from a greater attention to geography and a greater understanding of how ideas, politics and identities are anchored to the physical space of the earth.
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SOURCE: JSTOR Daily
8/30/2020
Florence Nightingale, Data Visualization Visionary
Today's biggest news stories are often told through data visualization. Telling stories through data-based pictures has a surprising source.
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SOURCE: Washington Post
6/17/2020
Forgotten Civil War Map Shows Antietam as a Cemetery
The digital map, which had attracted little notice outside of the New York Public Library, offers significant insight into the course of a pivotal Civil War battle.
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SOURCE: Smithsonian Mag
3/9/2020
This Interactive Map Visualizes the Queer Geography of 20th-Century America
by Meilan Solly
A new public history initiative spearheaded by historians Eric Gonzaba and Amanda Regan is poised to bring a series of guidebooks for gay travelers into the digital age, drawing on more than 30,000 listings compiled between 1965 and 1980 to visualize queer spaces’ evolution over time.
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SOURCE: Voice of America
1/11/19
Historian Susan Schulten on How Maps Provide a Special View of American History
Early maps helped establish a national identity and loyalty for the United States in its early days.
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SOURCE: Lewis & Clark Trail Heritage Foundation (Press Release)
4/25/18
The discovery of a map made by a Native American is reshaping thinking about the Lewis & Clark expedition
The discovery of the map shows the extent to which Lewis and Clark were helped by Native American geographers.
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SOURCE: WaPo
2-24-14
Who's most well-off in the United States? (Map)
Is your state among the most prosperous? Click here to find out.
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SOURCE: Vox Media
8-19-14
Website publishes 40 amazing maps that show the Roman Empire's rise and fall
by Timothy B. Lee
Here are 40 maps that explain the Roman Empire — its rise and fall, its culture and economy, and how it laid the foundations of the modern world.
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SOURCE: Al Jazeera America
2-16-14
How the North Ended Up on Top of the Map
by Nick Danforth
A cartographic history of what’s up.
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SOURCE: New Yorker
10-17-13
Why Abraham Lincoln Loved Infographics
Lincoln often poured over a map of slave density by county.
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SOURCE: National Post (Canada)
5-27-13
Canadian history on the block, cheap
A huge cache of Canadian history, stored for 200 years in three wooden chests held at a British estate, is set to be auctioned next month in London — a possible test of whether the controversy-plagued, funding-challenged Library and Archives Canada is still in the business of acquiring newly available treasures of documentary heritage. An extensive and important collection of letters, maps and other original artifacts left to posterity by Sir John Coape Sherbrooke — the Nova Scotia governor who conquered Maine during the War of 1812 and later served as Canada’s governor general — is to be sold on June 19 as the showcase lot in a major Bonhams auction of rare books and manuscripts.A large, coloured and “exceptionally fine” map of the village of York and the Lake Ontario shoreline that was created for Sherbrooke in 1817 — showing the future Toronto in such minute detail that individual homes are depicted — is a highlight of the sale, appearing on the cover of the auction catalogue.
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SOURCE: Atlantic Cities
5-9-13
Eric Jaffe: Why Historical Maps Still Matter
With 150,000 or so old print maps to his name, David Rumsey has earned his reputed place among the world's "finest private collectors." But the 69-year-old San Francisco collector doesn't have any intention of resting on his cartographic laurels. He continues to expand his personal trove as well as the digitized sub-collection he makes open to the public online — some 38,000 strong, and growing."I'm pretty old for a geek map guy," he says. "But I stay young by embracing new technologies all the time."
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
4-30-13
38,000 historical maps at DPLA
More than three decades ago, David Rumsey began building a map collection. By the mid-90s he had thousands and thousands of maps to call his own -- and his alone. He wanted to share them with the public.He could have donated them to the Library of Congress, but Rumsey had even bigger ideas: the Internet. "With (some) institutions, the access you can get is not nearly as much as the Internet might provide," Rumsey told Wired more than a decade ago. "I realized I could reach a much larger audience with the Internet."Bit by bit, Rumsey digitized his collection -- up to 38,000 maps and other items -- along the way developing software that made it easier for people to explore the maps and 3D objects such as globes online. Today, the Digital Public Library of America announced that Rumsey's collection would now be available through the DPLA portal, placing the maps into the deeper and broader context of the DPLA's other holdings....
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SOURCE: NYT
3-25-13
LoC historian publishes history of Renaissance man who named America
A DECADE AGO, the Library of Congress paid $10 million to acquire the only known original copy of a 1507 world map that has been called “the birth certificate of America.” The large map, a masterpiece of woodblock printing, has been a star attraction at the library ever since and the object of revived scholarly fascination about the earliest cartography of the New World. The research has also rescued from obscurity a little-known Renaissance man, the 16th-century globe maker Johannes Schöner, who was responsible for saving the map for posterity.Five years ago, John W. Hessler, a historian of cartography at the library, published “The Naming of America,” an account of the map’s importance in post-Ptolemy geography, its disappearance for centuries and its rediscovery in a castle near the Black Forest in southwestern Germany. Now, Dr. Hessler has dug deeper into the dynamic of the years between Columbus, in 1492, and Copernicus, in 1543. Science and exploration were stretching minds to distant horizons, once unknown. Copernican astronomy was about to dislodge Earth from the center of the universe, a start to the Scientific Revolution.